Ink-jet printing is a non-impact printing technique in which droplets of an ink are ejected through fine nozzles onto a substrate without bringing the nozzles into contact with the substrate.
Ink-jet printing is increasingly being used in the industrial sector. Industrial ink-jet printers are required to work at high speeds. To achieve this, a print-head for an industrial ink-jet printer will have multiple minute nozzles arranged at a high density to enable high productivity single-pass printing with acceptable print resolutions.
Ink formulation for all forms of ink-jet printing is extremely demanding. It is especially difficult to formulate inks able to reliably work in these high speed single-pass print-heads. The consequences of a blockage or failure of a single one of the tiny nozzles in a commercial ink-jet printer are potentially catastrophic since these print head are designed to work on high throughput media. Thus, a single nozzle not working could result in an unwanted white line appearing on an entire printing output which would then have to be discarded.
This new print-head technology has enabled ink-jet printing to be used in all printing applications including the printing of reactive dyes on to textiles.
The most widely used class of reactive dyes are those which utilise a monochlorotriazine reactive group.